As the U.S. pours billions in military aid into Ukraine, we host a debate on the Biden administration’s response to the war and U.S. policy toward Russia amid increasing calls among progressives for a diplomatic end to the conflict. We speak to former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who specialized in the Soviet Union. “Everyone understands that at some point there will need to be a negotiation to bring this war to a close, but I think the tension within the progressive community comes to when and how that diplomacy actually takes place,” says Duss. McGovern stressest that U.S. policymakers must understand Russia’s motivations, saying Russia sees the eastward expansion of NATO as threatening its core interests akin to how the United States viewed the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s. “We need to go back and figure out how this all started in order to figure out how to end it,” says McGovern.

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